50 shows to see at the Edinburgh fringe 2018
Superstar standups, daring dance, Brexit cabaret and a Bon Jovi musical … Dive into our guide to some of the shows at the world’s biggest arts festival
Continue ReadingTag: Theatre
Pieter-Dirk Uys review – South African satirist relives his apartheid clashes
Soho theatre, London
Uys delivers an engaging memoir about his life, from 1940s Cape Town to a regime-mocking drag act
Part memoir, part nostalgia trip for white South Africans, Pieter-Dirk Uys’s new monologue is a world away from the arch satirical turns with which he made his – or rather, his alter ego Evita Bezuidenhout’s – name. There are no frills, just Uys in black, on a stool, narrating his life story from 1940s Cape Town via a London education and back to a career mocking the apartheid regime in theatre and drag. It’s performed in a low-key style, but Uys is a capable raconteur with an eventful story that shines a light on social and political history across two continents.
A long-distance friendship with Sophia Loren provides a rather improbable subplot
Related: Hi, my name is Evita and I’m a racist
Continue ReadingKaty Brand: ‘We don’t want to replace men – we just want equal airtime’
The actor and comedian explains how her debut play, 3Women, captures the age divide within feminism – and the defiance of the #MeToo era
I recently gave a talk at a girls’ high school. I mention this not only because I am a virtue-signalling monster but also because one of the young women asked something that brought me up short: “How should we react, as young feminists, to older women who don’t seem to support us?”
I sat there and goldfished for a moment, keenly aware that these freshly minted teenage minds sat among their esteemed “older women” teachers. But this is one of the issues I have been grappling with in my debut play, 3Women, which is about three generations of the same family, aged 18, 40, and 65. They come together in an increasingly claustrophobic hotel suite the night before a wedding, ostensibly to enjoy some family bonding time. As more wine is ordered and drunk, the gloves come off, and there are old scores to settle.
Continue ReadingKaty Brand: ‘We don’t want to replace men – we just want equal airtime’
The actor and comedian explains how her debut play, 3Women, captures the age divide within feminism – and the defiance of the #MeToo era
I recently gave a talk at a girls’ high school. I mention this not only because I am a virtue-signalling monster but also because one of the young women asked something that brought me up short: “How should we react, as young feminists, to older women who don’t seem to support us?”
I sat there and goldfished for a moment, keenly aware that these freshly minted teenage minds sat among their esteemed “older women” teachers. But this is one of the issues I have been grappling with in my debut play, 3Women, which is about three generations of the same family, aged 18, 40, and 65. They come together in an increasingly claustrophobic hotel suite the night before a wedding, ostensibly to enjoy some family bonding time. As more wine is ordered and drunk, the gloves come off, and there are old scores to settle.
Continue ReadingFlight of the Conchords review – business time again, with irresistible new songs
Milton Keynes theatre
Brett McKenzie and Jemaine Clement return with a magisterial performance
“Some of you are probably thinking, ‘Gosh, they look a lot older,’” says Bret McKenzie, during one of Flight of the Conchords’ deliciously pregnant inter-song pauses. It is a remark met with a wall of knowing laughter: the screens either side of the stage succeed in underlining the star status of the duo, but also in highlighting the flecks of grey peppering their hair. Since they were last in the UK, the New Zealanders may indeed have become “dustier”, they may even have become rustier, but the pair are keen to reassure their Milton Keynes audience that they still know how to rock.
his confidence isn’t misplaced. The Conchords have lost neither their beguiling, monotonous demeanour nor their ability to perform laugh-out-loud, foot-tapping bangers while simultaneously deconstructing them. How easy it would have been to perform nothing but the hits – yet more than half of the 15 songs they play are comparatively new.
Related: Kings of loser comedy: how Flight of the Conchords took off
Continue ReadingKen Dodd, the man from Mirthy-side: a career in clips and 10 of his best jokes
From the Diddymen to dissecting northern humour, the Liverpudlian’s sense of absurdity never deserted him
My agent died at 90. I always think he was 100 and kept 10% for himself.
I do all the exercises every morning in front of the television – up, down, up, down, up, down. Then the other eyelid.
How many men does it take to change a toilet roll? Nobody knows. It’s never been tried.
What a beautiful day for dashing down to Trafalgar Square and chucking a bucket of whitewash over the pigeons and saying ‘There you are, how do you like it?’
I have kleptomania. But when it gets bad, I take something for it.
What a beautiful day for Dame Nellie Melba to drop a choc-ice down her tights and say ‘How’s that for a knickerbocker glory?’
You’ve got to be a comedian to live there. I call it Mirthy-side.
What a lovely day for knocking on a TV policeman’s door and saying: ‘Hello Mrs Savalas. Have you got a licence for your Telly?’
Did any of us, in our wildest dreams, think we’d live long enough to see the end of the DFS sale?
My dad knew I was going to be a comedian. When I was a baby, he said, ‘Is this a joke?’
Related: Ken Dodd: last of the music-hall maestros
Ken Dodd discussing northern humour on Late Night Line-Up in 1965 pic.twitter.com/qMYkbjGpbz
Continue ReadingKen Dodd: last of the music-hall maestros
The veteran’s linguistic prowess, outlandish appearance and musical smarts could tickle any audience into a state of collective ecstasy
The death of Ken Dodd not only leaves the nation a sadder place, it also feels like the end of an era. Doddy, as everyone in the business called him, was the last link with a music-hall tradition that stretched back through time to include legends such as Max Miller, George Robey and Dan Leno. He adapted his act to the demands of TV and radio, but he was essentially a man of the theatre who could induce in a thousand or more spectators a sense of collective ecstasy.
I claimed, when I interviewed Ken on his 90th birthday, that he and Laurence Olivier were the two performers in my theatre-going experience to be kissed with genius. But of what did that genius consist? For a start, a love of language that enabled him to usher us into a world of grotesque fantasy: a place of hairy Danes with bacon sandwiches strapped to their legs, of satyr-like seniors indulging in snuff orgies, of men with a third eye on the end of their finger. Even childhood was not immune. “I was born one day when me mother was out,” Ken used to quip. “We were so poor the lady next door had me.” That takes us back to Dan Leno who recollected a bizarre infancy in which he varnished the furniture, the cat and the interior of his dad’s boots with strawberry jam.
Related: Ken Dodd: farewell to the tattifilarious marathon man of comedy
Continue ReadingSir Ken Dodd obituary
Comedian with an endless desire to make people laugh known for his tickling sticks, Diddymen and marathon stage performances
The last great “front-cloth” comic of our times, and the last standing true vaudevillian, Ken Dodd, who has died aged 90, was even more than that – a force of nature, a whirlwind, an ambulant torrent of surreal invention, physical and verbal, whose Liverpudlian cheek masked the melancholy of an authentic clown. “This isn’t television, missus,” he’d say to the front stalls, “you can’t turn me off.” And then he would embark on an odyssey of gag-spinning that, over five hours, would beat an audience into submission, often literally, banging a huge drum and declaring that if we did not like the jokes he would follow us home and shout them through the letter-box.
He entered the Guinness Book of Records in 1974 with a marathon mirth-quake at the Royal Court Liverpool lasting three hours, 30 minutes and six seconds. But his solo shows, in which he would perform three 90-minute-plus sets between magic acts, or a female trumpeter (the formidable Joan Hinde), or a pianist playing country music (his partner Anne Jones), frequently lasted much longer. One good thing, he would say, was that you always went home in the daylight. “And the sooner you laugh at the jokes,” he would say, “the sooner you can go home,” as if we were in school. He admitted that his was an educational show – when you did get home you would think: “That taught me a lesson!”
Continue ReadingFlight of the Conchords review – an intense hit of comic bliss
Soho theatre, London
Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement return with hilarious dialogue and new songs that easily scale the dizzy heights of their best work
We knew months ago that Flight of the Conchords were to tour UK arenas. We didn’t know until it was upon us that they’d start with a week’s run at London’s bijou Soho theatre. The run sold out without a shred of publicity, and the show – 90 minutes of blissfully funny musical comedy – reminded us why. They’re a little greyer, a little less deadpan, and with more starry CVs than when they last visited the UK eight years ago: Bret McKenzie won the 2012 songwriting Oscar and Jemaine Clement featured in Moana and The BFG. But tonight, the pair prove with plenty to spare that when it comes to silly and sophisticated comic songwriting, there’s still no one to touch them.
For long-term fans of the erstwhile “fourth most popular folk parody duo in New Zealand”, the evening supplies an intense hit of pleasure. And not just nostalgic pleasure: most of the songs are new, and easily scale the dizzy heights of their best work. Seagull – a hymn to freedom that comes complete with metatextual commentary – seems to be sending up “free as a bird” cliches, before a hilarious reversal. Piano ballad Father and Son finds dad and boy singing in counterpoint – and at crossed purposes – about a parental breakup. “You never know how love will end,” sings Jemaine’s sad dad, “Just don’t let her spend time with your handsomer friend.” Neat how that gauche coinage “handsomer” makes dad seem even more ridiculous. But the track is tender as well as daft, like their earlier Bus Driver’s Song, revived tonight. Or like the best work of Tim Minchin – their only rival as musical comic of the century so far – whose spirit is summoned when Bret takes to his piano.
Continue ReadingThe Big Burns Supper – in pictures
Dumfries celebrates the birth of Robert Burns with dance, theatre, live art and comedy, turning Burns Night into a festival of contemporary arts Continue reading…
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